Ripe Data: the March 2007 Edition

by Levi Cooperman - April 12/2007

This is the fifth edition of Ripe Data — the monthly series that includes an assortment of metrics collected here at FreshBooks. My comments are written below in italics. Please note, Ripe Data does not include the valuable industry benchmarks active FreshBooks users will have access to next week. Remember what Mark Twain said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” Enjoy!

For companies who accept online payments:

In February, 17.9% of payments were accepted online
In March, 15.7% of payments were accepted online

A drop in payments that were accepted online is likely due to the large increase in new businesses trying FreshBooks in March and initially not accepting online payments.

Payment Methods:

Visa: 16.0% February, 14.4% March
Mastercard: 7.8% February, 7.3% March
Amex: 4.3% February, 4.2% March
PayPal: 6.5% February, 7.6% March
Other (including check, cash, account credit, etc.): 65.5% February, 66.5% March

PayPal had a significant jump in usage this month – it’s the biggest jump and the greatest market share we’ve seen PayPal take since we started tracking in November 2006.

For companies that send invoices by both email and by ground mail:

In February 96.2% of invoices were sent by email and 3.8% were sent by ground mail
In March 96.0% of invoices were sent by email and 4.0% were sent by ground mail

4% seems to be a consistent benchmark for this stat, February was just an unusually low month.

Browser Usage:

Internet Explorer 7: February 22.59%, March 24.04%
IE 6: February 34.36%, March 34.23%
Firefox 2.0: February 28.92%, March 29.02%
Firefox 1.5: February 10.03%, March 8.08%

It appears that the distribution of the Microsoft IE7 browser continues to gain ground on Firefox. This has been a consistent trend since December 2006.